Sunday, May 1, 2011

REVIEW: The Lost Tribe (2010)

Phew. OK, so after The Descent: Part 2 killed me, I was able to make a deal with the Reaper to let me come back to life. The only downside is, I have to keep reviewing these bad movies. With that said…The Lost Tribe.

“[The church] were the only ones who would want to stop the world from knowing…that God did not create man on the sixth day.”

-Some dumb bimbo

The first thing the film decides to show us is that it is a Roel Reine film:

A Roel Reine film? PRAISE THE LORD! ROEL REINE, OUR SAVIOR, HAS COME TO DELIVER US FROM EVIL! Ahem. Excuse my outburst. I just tend to get a little facetious when it comes to The Great One himself, Roel Reine. He is truly the filmmaker of our generation, and having his name on a project will automatically elevate it to godly status! Truly this was the best thing to show the audience before the movie started, allowing us to be comfortable with the knowledge that we are in good hands.

So, after that incredible deliverance of good news, the film starts out with shots of some people at this archaeological excavation in some remote, unidentified location, probably searching for the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. After a blonde woman looks ominously into the camera at something we can’t see, the scene changes to a dimly lit church where a guy comes in and gives another guy with a huge mullet a package of some kind. We then switch to yet another scene – can’t this movie just choose a fucking scene and stay with it? – where some military guys are chasing some unidentified thing through the jungle.

You know what this is? This is a compilement of generic scenes you see in every action or horror movie. Seriously, they’re so clichéd that they’re almost new again. You might as well just put Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone in there; it’d just complete the whole puzzle!

So anyway, the military guys find the girl from the first cut scene and take her hostage. When she doesn’t tell them what she saw, they shoot her. What the hell? Why? She’s obviously in shock and probably needs medical attention, and you’re shooting her just for not telling you what she saw right away? What kind of gung-ho assholes are these guys? I can guess that the United States probably won’t take any responsibility for them.

Then we cut to a boat sailing along in the ocean with 5 people on it. These are your main characters for the movie. They’re pretty bland and don’t have many distinguishing characteristics that can’t be summed up in one adjective. There’s the headstrong guy who acts like the leader at all times, the other guy who constantly argues with him, the level headed chick who is the smartest out of the whole group, the other chick who believes in a bunch of hippie, self empowering bullshit and a guy who has an Australian accent. That’s about all his character amounts to.

They all talk about some stuff below deck like musical deals and Mel Gibson movies and then go above deck and make out with their girlfriends. Except the Australian dude, who for some reason is the fifth wheel here. Sucks to be him. Then they find a guy covered in blood flailing and screaming in the water. Yeah. Because that scene goes so well with the one two seconds before it showing the couples making out and having sex! That makes sense.

They help the guy out and give him some sedatives, but the one leader guy won’t call the coast guard because “it will take too long for them to get there.” Bullshit reason; what, is he really worried to be missing that much of their precious vacation that he can't help this poor guy out? What a whiny prima donna. They argue for a bit but end up backing down at the leader guy’s whim. We then see that guy giving his girlfriend a little black box which she thinks will be a wedding proposal but is actually a key, which he says will open a door. Well thanks for getting her hopes up, jackass! This movie isn’t exactly inspiring me to start caring about these characters.

"I like you so much I'm going to get your hopes up by giving you a wedding ring box with a key in it...it's not like I could have just...GIVEN YOU THE KEY by itself...I guess I am a huge douchenozzle, huh?"

So while they’re all sleeping, the crazy guy who they found in the water gets up and sends their boat on a crash course toward this island. Why would he do this? I don’t know! The movie expects us to just buy the fact that he’s crazy and let that answer all our questions. They wake up just as the sun comes up and just as their boat is crashing, sending them all tumbling safely toward the shore with no injuries whatsoever. Wait, what? No injuries? What, are they just…superheroes or something? Did the boat have some kind of futuristic protection device that made it so none of them got hurt?

The next twenty or thirty minutes is basically just the characters all wandering around aimlessly in the forest. I’m glad they’re doing such productive things trying to get back home, too:

Procreation should not be a priority for these people.

There’s one part where they find the body of that crazy guy who crashed the ship in the first place, except it’s way up shore in the middle of the woods. It doesn’t make any sense at all, and even the characters remark how silly it is. He’s been bloodied up quite nicely – even if they do only show it close up so the actor never had to wear all that gory makeup himself. They bury him under some sand and then the leader guy and his girlfriend go into the jungle and find this abandoned excavation site. The girlfriend says that it’s her old teacher from New York. How the fuck does she know that? And what the hell are the odds that she’d actually shipwreck on the same island her old teacher had been researching on? Like, a billion to one? And how would he even find this uncharted hellhole of an island anyway? I probably shouldn’t be questioning this so much, should I?

So then the body of that other guy disappears somehow while they’re all searching around. They all start fighting and it’s revealed to the fat guy who argues a lot that the boat was actually NOT sunk by a malfunction of the radar equipment but because that crazy guy got up at night and changed the course himself. They all stomp off angrily and the leader guy says he wants to be left alone. Aw, poor baby. It’s not like there’s anything more important going on, like, oh, I don’t know, BEING TRAPPED ON A DESERT ISLAND WITH LITTLE HOPE OF ESCAPE. Maybe you shouldn’t have let that crazy guy go up and mess with the equipment. Dumbass.

So that guy gets killed and then the next day they all go looking for him. The Australian guy pusses out, and ironically so does the chick who always talks about the power of nature and all that crap. What a load of horseshit. And have I mentioned how awful the camera work and acting is in this movie yet? There’s this one scene where the Australian guy is screaming about how he wants to go back to the shore and “stop playing George of the Jungle.” Not only is the acting reduced to over the top shouting that anyone could do, but the camera zooms in on the dude’s right eye and barely shows us anything else!

So the only two characters that aren’t complete pussies go find that excavation site again only to find that there isn’t anything there anymore. They do come across a computer, though, with a video journal on it from that chick that got shot at the beginning of the movie. She says that – oh my god I’m going to get dumber typing this…she says that they found the missing link out there in the jungle, proving that there WAS evolution of human beings in the past. Then…good god!...okay, she says that the church tried to kill them to make sure they didn’t spread the word and convince people – this is the movie’s own words here – “that God did not create man on the sixth day.”

Ooh, a church conspiracy! Fuck, this makes the DaVinci code look positively smart by comparison.

GOOD FUCKING GOD. What the hell is wrong with you, movie? Okay, we need to divide this one into bullet points:

+ First of all, why are these people (the archaeological researchers) so surprised that they found proof of evolution? There’s already tons of that. I mean, OK, they found the ‘missing link’; I got that. But the way these people are talking, it’s like they live in the days when the church ruled everything and had an iron fist clamped on the throat of scientific discovery. It isn’t like that anymore! There are TONS of proofs from LOTS of different scientists that talk about why evolution is a feasible theory. This isn’t news, you bumbling morons! It’s common knowledge now!

+ Second, why would the church try to kill these people for finding out that evolution existed? What is this, the fucking dark ages? Is the mafia involved in the church now? This is so stupid…gah, why should I even have to say this? The church isn’t evil! I mean, sure, some of them might be scam artists trying to take your money in the name of hypocrisy, but to suggest that they’d send assassins to go kill anyone who found out about evolution is just insane. I don’t mean insane in a ha-ha-funny kind of way either, I mean INSANE. In a way that suggests that whoever said it should be LOCKED UP FOREVER. WITH THE KEY DESTROYED.

Clearly the reason for all the poor, oppressed scientists' woes!

Ugh…so after that debacle of logic and reason, all the other characters end up getting killed. The one chick is still alive and runs around, watching the ‘lost tribe’ do charming things like eat peoples’ intestines. She finds her boyfriend, who actually did have a wedding ring he wanted to give her – bad timing, though, as he’s apparently been skinned on the back for some reason. So…yeah, they rip out the one guy’s intestines, but the guy they captured FIRST, they leave alive. Yeah, funny how those double standards work, huh? Maybe they were planning to throw a tea party for the next one they captured!

Also, the voices of the lost tribe are just AWFUL. Picture a bullfrog being sodomized, and then recorded and played backwards, and maybe you’re somewhere in the ballpark of how irritating their voices sound. GOD IT’S ANNOYING. Make it stop! I could just sum up the rest of the entire movie like this:

LEAD GIRL: Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!

MONSTERS: GRGLGLRGLGRGLGRGLGRRRRGGG

LEAD GIRL: AhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHhhhhhhh!

MONSTERS: Grrrrrrrgggg!

Yeah, she gets away and we see this screen:

Dedicated to my greatest teachers? I don’t want to know what they were teaching him if this is the movie that came out of it. I mean this is just shit. It’s boring, the characters aren’t that interesting, and the plot is just SO DUMB. So what’s the purpose? Your time could better be spent doing anything more productive. Like educating the underprivileged about science and religion, because clearly this pigshit won’t do that! Skip this.